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in march 2024, china automotive quality network and kairui saichi consulting jointly launched the annual china automotive product quality outstanding contribution person selection promotion campaign, aiming to showcase managers' innovative practices in redefining and continuously improving product quality in multiple dimensions, and provide the industry with new ideas for responding to quality challenges.

in-depth visits to enterprises and dialogues with managers with outstanding contributions are important parts of this event. in this interview, zhang yue, senior vice president of kairui saichi consulting, talked with zhou fanhua, vice president of quality and safety of ideal auto, and had in-depth discussions on issues such as digital empowerment of quality management and how to deal with product quality management under the large category strategy.

zhang yue (right), senior vice president of kairui saichi consulting, has an in-depth conversation with zhou fanhua (left), vice president of quality and safety of ideal auto (photo: yang shuo)

zhou fanhua said that ideal auto always implements user thinking, puts user value first, and is committed to building and continuously optimizing the quality and safety system. by improving the overall quality level, it establishes a user reputation for quality and safety, and makes quality one of the core competitive advantages of ideal auto products.

full traffic awareness ensures that problems are not “discovered”

zhou fanhua, vice president of quality and safety of ideal auto (photo: yang shuo)

at present, the in-depth promotion of digitalization is helping automobile companies to restructure their core business processes. according to industry research data, digitalization combined with the internet of things and automation technology can shorten the product development cycle by 10%-20% and improve production efficiency by 20%-30%. digitalization has brought about a high degree of information flow, which has raised the efficiency of comprehensive identification and resolution of user problems to an unprecedented new level.

in zhou fanhua's view, the current achievements of ideal auto in today's rapidly developing new energy vehicle market are closely related to the application of digital technology. based on its excellent it and ai capabilities, ideal auto combines innovative digital information communication platforms to achieve the end-to-end (supply chain, r&d, production and manufacturing, user end, etc.) connection of full-flow digital work orders. through digital work orders, each node can communicate with each other and share information, so that resources can be connected at the first time, and the quality problems and feedback mentioned by users can be confirmed and solved 100%.

he said that through digital work orders, quality problems can be reviewed and traced back, accumulated into a library, and formed into a knowledge map, which can eventually be iterated into quality standards and design standards for promotion and application. ideal auto has almost all data online and visualized, allowing data to be shared to the greatest extent possible. whether it is r&d, manufacturing, suppliers, or after-sales service, communication and dialogue can be carried out in the same dimension. at the same time, in quality management work, digital work orders can also be used to capture the flow of problems throughout the life cycle, and work orders can be used to achieve full-process supervision and problem solving.

at the source, in order to meet users' multi-dimensional experience needs, quality management cannot be confined to the quality control of traditional automotive parts. it must start from the user's thinking. ideal auto focuses more on the quality characteristics that users highly perceive and demand.

zhou fanhua used ideal l9 as an example: in the early days of ideal l9's launch, a cullinan owner came into the store to experience ideal l9 and reported that the water cut lines were not aligned. after receiving the feedback, zhou fanhua immediately led the team to conduct an internal assessment and found that the water cut lines differed by 0.5 mm. in fact, the alignment of the water-cut chrome trim strips of l9 had reached a relatively high level in the industry at that time, but in line with the concept of "leading the industry and meeting user needs", the quality and safety team took the lead in carrying out special activities for matching water-cut chrome trim strips, and jointly challenged the engineering limits across departments. in the end, this problem was overcome in a short period of time, and the alignment of the water cut lines of subsequent models was truly at the leading level in the industry; this example fully reflects that ideal auto attaches importance to user needs and feedback, and aims to provide users with products that "exceed customer expectations".

zhou fanhua also mentioned that ideal auto has a dedicated person on duty 24 hours a day for quality and safety, and the joint call center and service team respond to users' after-sales needs around the clock. "at ideal auto, nps is operated as a company-level indicator. each user experience unit, such as user reputation, product, quality, and service, is managed in detail to continuously improve user satisfaction and ensure that user problems are not left unsolved."

three-dimensional interception to ensure that problems do not overflow

ideal auto production line (photo courtesy: ideal auto)

the rapid development of new energy vehicles is inseparable from the complementary development of electrification and intelligence, and intelligence is also the core competitiveness of ideal auto. in zhou fanhua's view, this is not only reflected in the car itself, but also in the company's intelligent manufacturing and inspection. as an innovation-driven company, ideal also continuously improves production efficiency and delivery quality through innovations in manufacturing process technology and management.

zhou fanhua said that ideal auto has extremely strict standards for quality control, ultra-high precision testing equipment, and up to 4,265 ultra-long inspections for each vehicle in the industry, to achieve comprehensive and three-dimensional interception to ensure high-quality delivery of each vehicle.

in terms of details, ideal auto has "upgraded" the current quality inspection technology commonly used in the industry: ideal blue light inspection has up to 800 measurement points for a single piece, with a measurement accuracy of up to 0.68um; in the welding workshop, each key dimension of the white body will undergo 100% automated dts inspection with an accuracy of up to 0.1mm, and three-coordinate measurement of 1,600 points on the entire vehicle, with a single-arm accuracy of 17+l/115≤60μm; the paint shop uses precision equipment such as orange peel meters and colorimeter to lock the inspection to the nanometer level to ensure consistency in appearance.

in addition, there are 3,656 off-line inspections for the final assembly of the vehicle, including 110 basic inspections, 600 new energy-specific inspections, 800 enhanced inspections, and 1,146 intelligent (intelligent driving & intelligent space) inspections. zhou fanhua also mentioned that in terms of factory road test inspections, ideal auto has the industry's most complete road spectrum and extremely strict vehicle delivery road test inspections, including 28 types of working conditions, and has achieved multi-condition and multi-functional inspections such as wind noise, tire noise, vehicle nvh, assisted driving, and vehicle automatic aging tests. at the same time, the harsh wading test environment with a depth of up to 30-50 cm ensures the insulation performance of the vehicle and the sealing of openings and closing parts.

full life cycle control to nip problems in the bud

zhou fanhua also mentioned that ideal auto's quality management team, in combination with the company's own situation, summarized and adopted the pqa+pqe management model. among them, pqa, as the guardian of end-to-end product quality, is responsible for vehicle quality strategic direction planning, goal setting, quality activity planning, process and result review, and ultimately achieves full life cycle control of product quality from the product development concept stage to mass production delivery, and then to the vehicle's entire life cycle. pqe sets up a quality project from the product development stage, divides the vehicle into three major projects, nine systems, and 49 modules, conducts risk assessment and verification in a refined manner, and puts risk problem detection management in the front; comprehensively and deeply identifies problems, solves problems efficiently and professionally, and forms a knowledge base through historical problem avoidance cycles, and then uses ai to establish a large fault tree model.

he believes that the pqa+pqe management model can advance the time of quality management intervention, intervene from the concept stage, discover problems in advance, prevent them in advance, and prevent quality risks before they happen. at the same time, by adhering to the end-to-end big data closed loop, the data of r&d, manufacturing, supply chain and user ends are connected, helping ideal auto achieve higher production efficiency and delivery quality.

in addition, ideal auto also strictly controls the supplier access threshold and quality management system to ensure the stability of the supplier system. zhou fanhua believes that excellent suppliers are the foundation of quality assurance. more than 1,000 strict inspection items have been formulated for the supplier's business maturity, quality system, process quality and product quality, and through digitalization, the interconnection and interoperability of supplier process data has been established to achieve effective control of the supplier's entire process quality.

ai empowers quality and meets new opportunities and challenges

ai-assisted intelligent production (photo courtesy: ideal auto)

from smart manufacturing to smart services, ai has gradually become the core driving force for reshaping the automotive industry. the complexity of intelligent product quality management in the new era under the large-category strategy will increase exponentially. in this regard, ideal has proposed a plan to implement ai empowerment.

"ideal auto uses ai to empower manufacturing quality, and based on three categories of high-tech technologies, vision, hearing, and touch, it has developed automated intelligent inspection equipment to replace manual quality inspection, improve inspection precision, efficiency, and accuracy, and at the same time develop its own big data model to solve the problems of data quantification and traceability, data analysis, and early warning." zhou fanhua said. in intelligent inspection, many projects are full-stack self-developed, the first in the industry, and industry-leading technology applications, including nvh intelligent detection, fast charging & slow charging automatic detection, vehicle equipment intelligent interconnection, lighting defect automatic detection, thermal imaging automatic detection, vehicle odor automatic measurement, etc., and many technologies are under continuous development and testing.

in addition, ai technology will assist all end-to-end links, freeing engineers from a large amount of tedious and complex work and processes, allowing them to perform more innovative work; at the same time, ai quality experts can greatly improve problem handling efficiency and enhance user experience.

at present, competition in the automotive industry is becoming increasingly fierce, and users' expectations for hardware quality, software quality and ota upgrade effects are constantly increasing. ideal auto has shifted hardware product quality management from passive inspection to active prevention, and from simply reducing failure rates to comprehensively improving user experience; at the same time, with the help of ai large model training and automated testing, it has iterated the end-to-end software quality closed-loop management process and built an advanced software quality system.

"implement user thinking, always put user value first, and constantly think about the quality needs of ideal auto's user groups." this is a sentence zhou fanhua mentioned repeatedly in an interview. zhou fanhua believes that in the future, the supply capacity of enterprises will undergo new changes. the proportion of self-research in core categories will increase, the localization of suppliers will accelerate, and there will be a surplus of traditional parts and components and bottlenecks in the stability of intelligent parts. all of these require the establishment of comprehensive and sufficient quality management and interlocking capabilities. for users, it is certain that "every ideal auto is a concrete manifestation of our commitment to product quality, and it is also a concentrated reflection of our care for quality, innovation and users."